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By the early l940s, when Ukrainian-born
Irène Némirovsky began working on what would become Suite
Française—the first two parts of a planned five-part novel—she
was already a highly successful writer living in Paris. But
she was also a Jew, and in 1942 she was arrested and deported
to Auschwitz: a month later she was dead at the age of thirty-nine.
Two years earlier, living in a small village in central France—where
she, her husband, and their two small daughters had fled in
a vain attempt to elude the Nazis—she’d begun her novel,
a luminous portrayal of a human drama in which she herself
would become a victim. When she was arrested, she had completed
two parts of the epic, the handwritten manuscripts of which
were hidden in a suitcase that her daughters would take with
them into hiding and eventually into freedom. Sixty-four years
later, at long last, we can read Némirovsky’s literary masterpiece.
The first part, “A Storm in June,” opens
in the chaos of the massive 1940 exodus from Paris on the
eve of the Nazi invasion during which several families and
individuals are thrown together under circumstances beyond
their control. They share nothing but the harsh demands of
survival—some trying to maintain lives of privilege, others
struggling simply to preserve their lives—but soon, all together,
they will be forced to face the awful exigencies of physical
and emotional displacement, and the annihilation of the world
they know. In the second part, “Dolce,” we enter the increasingly
complex life of a German-occupied provincial village. Coexisting
uneasily with the soldiers billeted among them, the villagers—from
aristocrats to shopkeepers to peasants—cope as best they can.
Some choose resistance, others collaboration, and as their
community is transformed by these acts, the lives of these
these men and women reveal nothing less than the very essence
of humanity.
Suite Française is a singularly
piercing evocation—at once subtle and severe, deeply compassionate
and fiercely ironic—of life and death in occupied France,
and a brilliant, profoundly moving work of art.
Irène Némirovsky was born
in Kiev in 1903 into a successful banking family. Trapped
in Moscow by the Russian Revolution, she and her family fled
first to a village in Finland, and eventually to France, where
she attended the Sorbonne.
Irène Némirovsky achieved early success
as a writer: her first novel, David Golder, published
when she was twenty-six, was a sensation. By 1937 she had
published nine further books and David Golder had been
made into a film; she and her husband Michel Epstein, a bank
executive, moved in fashionable social circles.
When the Germans occupied France in 1940,
she moved with her husband and two small daughters, aged 5
and 13, from Paris to the comparative safety of Issy-L’Evêque.
It was there that she secretly began writing Suite Française.
Though her family had converted to Catholicism, she was arrested
on 13 July, 1942, and interned in the concentration camp at
Pithiviers. She died in Auschwitz in August of that year.
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